I have been awarded an NSF grant (DMS #1815667) on a three-year project: Regularity and Singularity Formation in Swarming and Related Fluid Models. It is translated to DMS #1853001 when I move to University of South Carolina.

Abstract

Swarming is a commonly observed complex biological and sociological phenomenon. The internal interaction mechanism attracts a lot of attention in physics, engineering, biology, and social sciences. This project is devoted to developing a unified mathematical theory towards the understanding of the swarming dynamics, as well as other nonlocal models that share similar structures. These models are widely considered in fluid mechanics, meteorology, astrophysics, biology, and ecology. The study of the regularity and singularity formations of these equations will provide a firm theoretical foundation for these applications, and also help consolidate the validity of these models in describing the natural phenomena.

The research will focus on understanding the nonlinear and nonlocal phenomena in swarming dynamics, and models having related structures in fluid mechanic. Three different but related models will be investigated. The first model is the Euler-Alignment system, which describes the flocking behavior in animal swarms. The goal is to develop a robust toolbox to analyze the nonlocal alignment operator and its balance with the drift nonlinearity. Similar behaviors are also observed in other fluid equations including porous medium flow, and surface quasi-geostrophic equations, which will be investigated using the same analytical techniques. The second model is the 2D inviscid Boussinesq equations. The global regularity is one of the outstanding problems in fluid dynamics. The idea is to construct solutions to capture the possible singularity formation, starting from some modified versions of the equations. The third model is the kinetic swarming system. The aim is to investigate the important relation between the kinetic equation and a variety of hydrodynamic limits. In particular, different alignment operators will be considered at the kinetic level. They are expected to lead to different macroscopic limits. All these three sub-projects will advance the mathematical understanding of nonlocal PDEs and related applications. They will also provide education and training to graduate and undergraduate students in this active field.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

NSF award page on the grant DMS #1853001

Changhui Tan

Communications in Mathematical Sciences, Volume 17, No 7, pp. 1779-1794 (2019).

Abstract

We study a 1D fluid mechanics model with nonlocal velocity. The equation can be viewed as a fractional porous medium flow, a 1D model of quasi-geostrophic equation, and also a special case of the Euler alignment system. For strictly positive smooth initial data, global regularity has been proved in [Do, Kiselev, Ryzhik and Tan, Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal., 228(1):1–37, 2018]. We construct a family of non-negative smooth initial data so that solution is not \(C^1\)-uniformly bounded. Our result indicates that strict positivity is a critical condition to ensure global regularity of the system. We also extend our construction to the corresponding models in multi-dimensions.

	doi:10.4310/CMS.2019.v17.n7.a2
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	This work is supported by NSF grant DMS #1853001

Alexander Kiselev, and Changhui Tan

SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis, Volume 50, No 6, pp. 6208–6229 (2018).

Abstract

The Euler–Poisson-alignment (EPA) system appears in mathematical biology and is used to model, in a hydrodynamic limit, a set of agents interacting through mutual attrac- tion/repulsion as well as alignment forces. We consider one-dimensional EPA system with a class of singular alignment terms as well as natural attraction/repulsion terms. The singularity of the alignment kernel produces an interesting effect regularizing the solutions of the equation and leading to global regularity for wide range of initial data. This was recently observed in [Do et al., Arch. Ration. Mech. Anal., 228 (2018), pp. 1–37]. Our goal in this paper is to generalize the result and to incorporate the attractive/repulsive potential. We prove that global regularity persists for these more general models.

	doi:10.1137/17M1141515
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	This work is supported by NSF grant DMS #1853001

Alina Chertock, Changhui Tan, and Bokai Yan

Kinetic and Related Models, Volume 11, No 4, pp. 735-756 (2018).

Abstract

We propose a new class of asymptotic preserving schemes to solve kinetic equations with mono-kinetic singular limit. The main idea to deal with the singularity is to transform the equations by appropriate scalings in velocity. In particular, we study two biologically related kinetic systems. We derive the scaling factors, and prove that the rescaled solution does not have a singular limit, under appropriate spatial non-oscillatory assumptions, which can be verified numerically by a newly developed asymptotic preserving scheme. We set up a few numerical experiments to demonstrate the accuracy, stability, efficiency and asymptotic preserving property of the schemes.

	doi:10.3934/krm.2018030
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Tam Do, Alexander Kiselev, Lenya Ryzhik, and Changhui Tan

Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, Volume 228, No 1, pp. 1-37 (2018).

Abstract

We study a pressureless Euler system with a non-linear density-dependent alignment term, originating in the Cucker–Smale swarming models. The alignment term is dissipative in the sense that it tends to equilibrate the velocities. Its density dependence is natural: the alignment rate increases in the areas of high density due to species discomfort. The diffusive term has the order of a fractional Laplacian \((-\partial_{xx})^{\alpha/2}, \alpha\in(0,1)\). The corresponding Burgers equation with a linear dissipation of this type develops shocks in a finite time. We show that the alignment nonlinearity enhances the dissipation, and the solutions are globally regular for all \(\alpha\in(0,1)\). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of such regularization due to the non-local nonlinear modulation of dissipation.

	doi:10.1007/s00205-017-1184-2
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